“What do I hear for these valuable but slightly irregular Florida GOP delegates? Do I hear three million? What’s that Mr. Santorum, twenty thousand? Get away from me boy, you bother me!

Three million, three million…I’d recognize that flabby white arm anywhere, Mr. Gingrich is in for three million dollars! Mr. Gingrich is over the moon or maybe not but the bidding continues! Do I hear four million?

Four million, four million…(THUMP!) …Mr. Romney has dropped an airlifted safe onto Mr. Gingrich containing sixteen million dollars! There are no bidders left…no Mr. Paul, we don’t accept Ayn Rand Gold Standard Buckaroos…someone please escort Mr. Paul to the auction for Bigfoot artifacts…as I said, there are no bidders left so the delegates go to Mr. Romney for $16 million dollars! Congratulations Mr. Romney, you’ve just bought yourself a great set of delegates. Just remember, don’t get them wet or let them eat after midnight! Just kidding ya, enjoy!”

Don’t you love American democracy? Where money is speech and Groupon has special limited time offers for delegates?

In this era of recession, unemployment and foreclosures, when over 46 million out of 307 million Americans live in poverty, our social system may be crumbling due to the damage the top 1% have wrought on it but at least our elections not only remain consistent but provide a money-back guarantee to the highest bidder.

As all the pundits agree, The Emperor With No Clothes is buying himself another transparent suit today. Mitt Romney is expected to win the Florida GOP Primary tonight but what is kind of surreal is that it seems universally acknowledged that it is due primarily to the spending of around $16 million in negative advertising against Newt Gingrich and not because people actually support Romney as their candidate. Add to that, the in-your-face campaign the GOP has made through the Mainstream Media to destroy Gingrich and make clear to their party, “We have decided on who will be our nominee, your job is to vote for that candidate so the image of this being democratically decided can still be argued by us.”

To be clear, Mitt Romney is expected to win the Florida GOP Primary, not because he has made a strong case for why he is qualified, because he is likeable, due to his favorable stands on the issues, as a result of his vision for the future of the nation…no, he is openly touted to win because he spent five times more money on negative advertising in Florida than Gingrich. That’s all.

Is that really a dynamic we should be talking about so openly in public without feeling this whole “democracy” thing is just a sham? Sure, Romney robotically echoes words about American Exceptionalism and American Freedoms but he does so while his campaign manipulates Florida voters like unexceptional rats in a maze as he writes a check for the delegates he’s decided to buy.

And what about Florida voters? They have been subjected to a massive inundation of propaganda that is telling them to do what their told…but when they vote and explain it by saying that they were just following what the commercials told them to do, is that an acceptable excuse? When you have all the voices in the media telling you that you’re being manipulated by all the money spent on manipulating you, shouldn’t you shake your head and say, “I am not a puppet!”

Unfortunately, Corporate America, which backs the big money candidates, has spent many years and many millions (more likely billions) investigating and refining the tools of propaganda and how to both conceive and test ads that will convince people that drinking a “diet” concoction of laboratory chemicals, caffeine, salt and gas is good for them and will make them thin and healthy.

If you can sell the public that eating liquified then molded chicken beaks, guts, feet, ammonia, artificial flavoring and other chemicals are “fun and tasty”, you can convince them that voting for a liquified then molded candidate with artificial positions and sweeteners is a good thing too.

Americans want to be sold on things, they want to be convinced to like things or buy things. It’s actually a good feeling to many people and they welcome it. Actually, now it’s more than just wanting to be sold on something. With the advancement in marketing research, advertisers have learned how to stimulate fear and desire in people in a way that is as highly effective as a sheepdog herding sheep into a corral.

So, many people just can’t help themselves from doing exactly as they’re propagandized to do, partly because the advertisers now know how to wire directly into their brains and partly because they want authority figures to tell them what is good or bad and what they should want or do.

There are many people who see propaganda for what it is and don’t allow something as suspect as a tv commercial to make them buy a body spray because the ad shows it makes gorgeous members of the opposite sex lust for them nor do they vote as ads insist they should. Such people reason for themselves and make decisions based on something they possess as a higher form of life, such as information, reasoning or principle. However, this appears to be a minority of voter/consumers. The reality is that, except for a few exceptions, the candidate that spends the most money on advertising, wins over a majority of people to vote for him/her.

Occupy Wall Street and the financial hardships millions of Americans are suffering through now should help to inoculate many from being so simply swayed to do as the conditioning they’re subjected to would dictate but when it comes to GOP voters, looking for critical thinking even in the current environment is like looking for Mitt Romney to say “I believe” believably.

What about the Independent Voters, who will ultimately decide who is elected President and which party runs the houses of Congress? Which side of the fence are they on? Will they be just as vulnerable to the hundreds of billions in negative advertising against President Obama that will flood the nation’s air waves? Will they drink their Coke and gobble up their McNuggets, nodding their heads at descriptions of Obama as a “European Socialist”, “An absolute failure”, “Made the recession worse”, “Weak on foreign policy” just as the weak minded Republicans have in the GOP primaries? Or will they reject the old proposition of, “Who are you going to believe, my very attractive and powerful negative ads or your lying memory?”

Also, one has to add to this mix that unlike Gingrich, Pres. Obama will be armed with hundreds of millions to advertise positively about himself, his accomplishments and his vision for the future. And of course, there will be negative advertising against Romney both from Pres. Obama, his Super PAC and other outside groups. You can’t go into a gunfight empty-handed because you oppose guns or, good intentions or not, you will lose. So, as long as we have this corrupt Citizens United ruling in place, as long as there are no truth in advertising laws against political ads (though there may be in the future), as long as we don’t have mandatory public funding for campaigns and far shorter campaign seasons, these are the rules and tools of the game and you stand on principle against using them at your own risk of defeat.

In the end, I am optimistic that most American voters will reject this kind of manipulation from the GOP and will not support an obvious corporate and Wall Street facade as President of the United States. I say this not because I have great faith in Americans’ wisdom, reason or vision.

What I do have great faith in is pain.

When your hand is hurting because someone has pounded on it with a hammer, no matter how wonderful the assurance is that pounding it with the hammer again will make it feel better, bullshit can’t override pain.

People are really suffering across the country and they know why. The majority doesn’t blame Obama for causing their pain though some are upset at him for not making it go away. They have been hammered by the top 1% rigging our democracy and economy in an act of class warfare, to drain them of their wealth and futures so the top 1% can become more obscenely rich and more tyrannically powerful.

Can enough advertising convince most Americans that pounding a hammer on their hand once again will take the pain away and actually make their hand feel wonderful and rich?

I’ll bet all my chicken nuggets that this time, it can’t.

With all that said, we will be live blogging the election today and tonight, you’re invited to share your comments here about our democracy, money in politics, Romney, Newt and this primary throughout the day. Tonight we’ll live blog as results come in but be prepared, it could be a very early night, if Romney’s lead ends up as big as predicted, he could be declared the winner right after polls close as has been the pattern since NH but you can still hang around and chat, someone’s got to drink all these pomegranate martinis anyway!

96 Responses so far.

Hey Planeteers: Remember when the deficit was the most important thing in the world? I sure do. It was way back in 2010. Every single Republican in office or out of office rent their garments, shed crocodile tears, and pulled their hair over the size of the national debt and the deficit.

During the election of 2012, one would think this is a hot topic for the GOP primaries right?

Does anyone remember one question from the MSM during the 231 debates about how Mitt Romney’s tax plan is estimated to add nearly 2 trillion to the deficit 2015? Or how he expects to reconcile dramatical­ly lower tax receipts with his promise to reduce the deficit and national debt?

Gingrich’s plan adds 3 trillion to the deficit in just 3 years.

How do any of these candidates propose to reconcile the 15-20% cut in revenue, and the 1% cut in domestic gdp due to reduced govt. spending somehow making the deficit smaller?

I guess we’ll never know until the general election. Maybe not even then.

Morning Funk, great post! They are spending like always and the deficit is not going to get in their way. Any of the crop of GOPers talk out the side of their mouth, saying one thing to one group and another to a different group.

What bothers me is the media lets them get away with it (lying) without calling them on their lies!

Great points, Funk! In the GE, these things will come back to light but there is no place in the GOP primary for anything of substance. It’s purely about winning the game by extreme pandering, frequently lying about how RW they are and all the delusional RW things they will do if elected.

It is the Republican version of a beauty contest, all about the superficial and only presenting shallow, simplistic statements.

As mentioned by pundits tonight, Romney might pull a stunt by adopting a flat tax plan along the way and tossing his complicated plan…which would create an even bigger deficit than his current plan.

Remember this is the first all GOP primary because it’s closed to Independents and Democrats. So like some of us hypothesized, the turnout with primaries in SC, NH and IA caucus were probably only higher because Independents and Democrats voted for Paul. Paul also had his lowest showing by far in FL with only 7% of the vote which is consistent with that notion.

I can’t express how terrible this low turnout is for the GOP moving forward, especially since FL has early voting. This significantly lower turnout bodes very badly for whoever is the GOP nominee because it’s a result of a totally negative campaign. Worse yet after four states a whopping 38% of Republican are not happy with this GOP field yet in FL according to MSNBC exit polls.

Of course every primary is just a snapshot of the GOP race and extrapolating what this horrible turnout means for the GOP nominee in the general election, even for FL is a leap but the Obama team must be grinning ear to ear for now.

It’s very encouraging to hear that the pandering is doing the opposite of what’s intended and turning off the voters it’s aimed at. Romney may have won percentage-wise but if turnout was depressed due to people’s disgust at the GOP race there, then Obama is the real winner of the FL primary.

Looking at the counties Mitt won….the Southern Counties which have northern demographics..and the ones that Newt one….the Northern Counties which have southern demographics, the next month should be very interesting.

This is what Newt’s room really looked like before his speech. Tight camera angles can only work so well. Plus he had a hardware convention in the other room. Apparently a lot of the audience were hardware guys wandering over to see what was going on.

Murph, Gov Spitzer on Current said that it will be hard for them to keep saying this stuff over and over when the unemployment is going down not up, doesn’t need to be below 7%, housing prices are going down, and gas prices staying down (which may go up but okay if come back down), won’t work against Obama.

Let me just say right now: this speech is the most dishonest, manipulative, disgusting series of lies I’ve heard in a very long time. And its core premise: that the president hates this country, whereas Romney believes in it. As I said: disgusting. I’m with Newt on this. The man will say anything to gain power.

I have to admit I didn’t even listen to it this time. I heard his first three and I have no idea what this guy Mittens is for at all. He just keeps on spouting the same lies because he thinks people will believe them.

I can’t believe in Romney’s speach that he said, “Remember when you look at your savings account…..” Really? Most don’t have a savings account anymore, asshole! And, certainly no trust fund! Nothing like you have, JERK!! You always have had one!

He may or may not get 50…….depends on whether the RNC holds to their judgment and insists on proportional allotment (a penalty for changing their primary date). The Florida RC says it will award the delegates as a block.

money has always has the floor unless the masses really organize but there is a saturation point where “absorbers” stop absorbing. What scares me is a Las Vegas casino guy with strong ties to Isreal buying a candidate. And it could be someone else obviously but a special interest backer is troublesome especially as it influences foreign policy: this is exactly what the founders were hoping to avoid